Well, thank you and your students. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot!

well.... yes.🙂

I really didn't want to think more about LLMs but, as always, you focus on the right issue and do it so well that I now have think about it. (I was pretty sure that there are no unified agents we talk to here. Why do you force me to think?)

Roughly: in distraction processing some information interferes with task performance. If processing that information is more valuable than performance of the task, then distraction is valuable. I just uploaded the files on my website, if you wanna have a look www.sebastianwatzl.com

my man.

Hope it's interesting!

I can't offer good beer or music, but maybe you're interested in our paper that just came out: link.springer.com/article/10.1... We try to keep it simple on the economics side since we wanted to get to some of the ethics issues. (the paper was finished before the Loewenstein and Wojtowitcz came out)

Our argument is that too much external influence or control that a subject cannot adequately control in turn undermines our autonomy. The moral problem of the attention market in some way is like the moral problem of duress or coercion. Talk about stress/overuse and so is all irrelevant.

Stress has nothing to do with our argument. We don't even mention the word in the paper.

But not all markets are unproblematic: think of drug markets and prostitution. The attention is like that, we argue. It is a market in external influence. At at scale, it threatens to undermine a self-determined life. Respect for individual freedom entails, at least, heavy regulations. 4/4

What’s wrong with that? Lots of complaint are too quick. As a market, the attention market is a voluntary transaction. Doesn’t respect for individual freedom entail that if a person wants free email more than control over their attentional landscape, no one has the right to deny them that wish? 3/4

The attention market we argue sells access to attention landscaping. It's is a bit like the labor market. In one, people exchange control over the capacities for work for a salary. In the other, people exchange control over the environment that affects their attention to access services. 2/4

@chrislhayes.bsky.social , @superwuster.bsky.social and others talk about the commodification of attention. But many of us on the academic side of attention were thinking: really? And sure: lots of deep problems, but are they due to the commodification of attention ? So, we tried to find out … 1/4

That's helpful. Thanks!

Couldn't there be a bunch of different, slightly related phenomena? If there was a distinctive soclal norm for it, then it would be interesting, but then why not directly pick it as 'the speech act that is governed by THIS norm'. Somehow I'm still confused... 2/2

I see. From an outsider's perspective, it's not entirely obvious to me in what sense there is something 'to give an account of' here, something like a natural kind of social interaction that one can get right. 1/2

How is the proof not testimony? (seems to be testimony on the Graham and Lackey accounts) (at least if it is communicated to someone, like written down or uttered in a way that's intended for someone to pay attention to)

Thanks for the references! (I am actually new to this game)

(background: communication isn't defined as information exchange; it's a way of ostensively re-directing attention that can be used to exchange information but also for many other things; see Jessica Keiser's work, Scott-Phillips and Heintz, or Sperber and Wilson)

So, the view I sort of like: communication is governed by lots of social norms. The knowledge norm is one of them. In some social circumstances that norm is very powerful, under others it is not. The question: what social circumstances foreground the knowledge norm over other norms?